Treble Troubles? Marketization, Social Protection and Emancipation Considered Through the Lens of Slavery

Good Tech, Bad Tech: Policing Sex Trafficking with Big Data

“…For instance, when technology is to blame, we do not need to be concerned with how restrictive immigration policies create a demand for irregular migration services (Castles, de Haas and Miller 2014;O'Connell Davidson 2013), which increases the risk of migrants becoming exploited due to the debts incurred to finance migration (Agustín 2006;Mai 2009;Plambech 2017). Similarly, the focus on technology means that there is less scrutinisation of the mechanisms of neoliberal capitalism, which create more precarious forms of labour and hollowed-out welfare systems and contribute to different forms of exploitation across a multitude of labour markets (Milivojevic, Moore and Segrave 2020;Musto, Thakor and Gerasimov 2020;O'Connell Davidson 2016b). Therefore, the explanation that technology is driving sex trafficking is a convenient justification for not challenging and changing the current systems of inequality.…”

“…For instance, even if poverty is attributed as a causal factor to exploitation, how poverty is produced and reproduced within current economic systems is often neglected (Howard 2018). Similarly, with the rollback of welfare systems, deindustrialisation and erosion of workers' social protections, many are driven to more precarious forms of employment or labour in informal markets (O'Connell Davidson 2016a, 2016b). An uncomfortable fact for many anti-traffickers is that our global economy is dependent upon an increasingly precarious and exploited labour force to maintain growth (Gadd and Broad 2018;Munro 2016).…”